Language production is generally viewed as a process in which conceptual semantic messages are transformed into linguistic information. Such a description is probably appropriate for some aspects of the process (e.g. noun production), yet it is clearly incomplete.

Consider for instance the fact that in numerous languages determiner forms depend not only on semantic information but also on several other kinds of information. In Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, the retrieval of the determiners (and other closed- class words, such as pronouns) also depends on a property of the nouns called “grammatical gender.” For instance, in Dutch, nouns belong to the so-called “neuter” gender or to the “common” gender. The definite determiners accompanying the nouns belonging to the two sets are respectively het (e.g. het huis, ‘the house’) and de (e.g. de appel, ‘the apple’). In English, consonant-initial nouns and vowel-initial noun can require different indefinite article forms (e.g. a pear vs. an apple).

Such properties of determiners surely impose constraints on how these lexical items can be retrieved. For this very reason, determiners provide a broad testing ground for contrasting psycholinguistic hypothesis of lexical processing and grammatical encoding. In my talk, I will review the cross-linguistic research I have been conducting on determiner retrieval. One important question that will be asked, and only tentatively answered, concerns the extent to which open-class words such as nouns and closed-class words such as determiners are processed and selected by similar mechanisms.